Splats and Stripes

I love love love Splat nails.  You probably all know this by now.

I also love love love using striping tape.

So I decided to combine the two!

To do this I used the following polishes:

• Sinful Colours - Snow White
• Barry M Gelly Mango
• Barry M Gelly Key Lime
• Barry M Gelly Pomegranate
• Barry M Gelly Guava (can you tell these are my favourite polishes at the moment)
• and of course OPI Nail Envy and Sally Hansen Insta-Dry

The manicure is easy to do:

1. Base coat first.
2. Then two coats of sinful colours in white.
3. Next, use Sally Hansen Insta-Dry to ensure the base colour is completely dry.
4. Once you're positive it's dry, apply striping tape in any pattern you want.  I wanted to create a sun ray type look.  Remember what order you put them down so that you can remove them in the reverse order.
5. Working nail by nail, use medium sized straws to blow your polish at your nail.  Vary the distance to get different sized "splodges".
6. Remove the tape quickly and in the reverse order to how you applied them.
7. Repeat steps 5 & 6 for each nail.
8. Once the polish is completely dry, clean up and add a top coat.

And voila!  The clean-up for this manicure actually takes longer than the doing!

An InLinkz Link-up

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Gelly Splatter Nails

I love love love Splatter nails.  They look really good and I love cleaning up the mess too.

Here's a manicure I did with Barry M Gellys - Guava, Mango, Key Lime and Pomnegranate.  I blow the nail polish onto a white base (Sinful Colours) then tidied up and topped with two layers of top coat.

Simple, but really effective.

An InLinkz Link-up

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Challenge Week 15: Black & White

This week's challenge is Black & White.  Should have been easy, say you?  Well first I forgot and then I ruined my last nail art brush freehanding another black & white design so I had to scrap that attempt and then I forgot again.

Then I remembered that I have been longing to try the "splatter" technique for ages and thought that this would look amazing with just black and white.  So I gave it a go.

The splatter technique is really easy to do.  Just incase you don't know how, here's a small tutorial.

What you need:

• Straws (I used one out of a drink carton)
• Newspaper (to cover your surfaces, this gets messy)
• Polishes of your choice

The colours I used:

• Barry M Black
• Model's Own White

How to do it:

1. Chose a colour for your base.  For this manicure I used white.
2. Give it at least 10 minutes for the base to dry, or use a quick dry top coat.
3. Once it's dry, dip your straw into the first colour (for this manicure black).  This needs to go in far enough to create a "film" over the top.
4. Holding the straw about 5cm above your nail, blow sharply into the straw (a nice short puff works best).
5. Once the splatter has dried, splatter with more colours.
6. Tidy up.
7. Add a top coat to finish

As you can see from the first picture, the manicure is really messy at first.  I tried using tape, but found it difficult to hold the straw with tape covered fingers!

But once it's cleaned up the manicure is actually really effective.

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